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The greatest Turkish architect and mosque builder was the brilliant Sinan (1489-1588), who was born a Greek Christian, and who learned his engineering skills while a janissary. A former Christian used a former Byzantine church [the Hagia Sophia] as the model for the glorious mosques that awed visitors to Turkey and are today seen as the apex of Islamic civilization.

"People think that threats aimed at Muslims who've become Christians only happens in Muslim countries like Morocco or Iraq" says Johanna Marten, team leader of the Arabic work at the Gave foundation, an inter-church organization which helps churches with missionizing among asylum seekers. "Many people in the Netherlands have no idea of the problems that Muslims in the Netherlands encounter when they become Christian. They don't know that also in the Netherlands there are concrete threats and attacks in the name of Islam."

There is ongoing violence in this largely-Muslim central Asian country. Pray that God would bring something positive out of all of this, and that justice and mercy would be present in all hearts, and that the Gospel would go forth.

The people also expect their leaders to do miracles, to save them, and take care of them from cradle to grave. This condition spills down to the rest of society. As a child I remember my grandparents’ hands being kissed by poor villagers who needed something. My grandparents often refuse the bowing and the kiss, but are often pleased by it. Servants submit to their masters, workers to their bosses and children to their parents. Maids often have to express total respect and submission and very often to physical and sexual abuse. There is a sad dependency for one’s welfare upon the graces of any one above you in the Moslem hierarchy of submission. Since initiative is stifled, most people wait for things to happen to them rather than change things on their own. Thus dependency becomes the norm. Slavery may have been abolished officially, but it is alive and well in a different form called submission.

The 64-thousand dollar question is whether Islam does fit into a democratic system. In a way, the question is not a question. It has been answered numerous times, both in theory and in the praxis. Alas, the results unearthed have always been the wrong, that is non-PC ones. The central problem issues from the concept of the desirable relationship between state and church. Even in case of the devout, in the advanced democratic and mainly Western entities, the principle of separation prevails. Here one would argue that the arrangement is to the benefit of both the worldly and the spiritual order. Islam’s tradition considers that the state is a worldly expression of the heavenly order. This determines not only the purpose of the state but also makes it subject to the supervision of those whose mandate comes from God.

Pope Honorius II (d. 1130) approved the following rules of conduct and discipline for the order in 1128:

• to recite vocal prayers at certain hours;• to abstain from meat four days in the week; to cease hunting and hawking;• to defend with their lives the mysteries of the Christian faith;• to observe the seven sacraments of the church, the fourteen articles of faith, thecreeds of the apostles and Athanasius;• to uphold the doctrines of the Two Testaments, including the interpretations of the church fathers, the unity of God and the trinity of his persons, and the virginity of Mary both before and after the birth of Jesus;• to go beyond the seas when called to do so in defense of the cause;• to retreat not from the foe unless outnumbered three to one.

from 'The Knights Templar' in The Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained by Brad and SHerry Stelger. 2003.